The Other Way Through: Equality is Not Only Argued, it is Earned

August 26 carries two anniversaries. In 1920 it is the day the Nineteenth Amendment was certified. In 1930 it is the day BPW International was founded in Geneva, at the initiative of Dr. Lena Madesin Phillips, who had founded this federation eleven years before that. The date the country marks as Women’s Equality Day is the same date our own global movement chose for its beginning. The women who built this organization did not wait for the law to settle before they went and organized the world into a movement and a sisterhood that we know as BPW.

BPW was among the first women’s organizations in the country to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment, in 1937. Nearly ninety years later the amendment is still not settled law, and in the interval, we have watched protections that, decades ago, we celebrated as being permanent, become contested again.

Anyone who assumed the line only moves in one direction has been corrected. Some days it feels as though we went to sleep in 2026 and woke up in 1955.

The question is not whether we keep advocating. We will, and we must. The question is what we are doing with the second lever, the one that does not depend on a legislature, a court, or a vote we do not control. That lever is indispensability.

Advocacy defends what we were granted, but enterprise builds what cannot be withdrawn.

Our own record makes the case better than any argument I could construct. When President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, he handed the first pen to Dr. Minnie Miles, the national president of BPW. He did that because BPW had done the work across four decades: the classification of women’s skills, the state legislative groundwork, the research, the testimony, the sustained presence in rooms where the subject was decided. The pen followed the expertise. It continues to work in that order even to this day. But the pens handed out today are not given by right. They are earned and earning one earns the seat where the next law gets written.

The same opening is in front of us now, on a much larger scale. The world is generating new problems faster than existing institutions can solve them. Supply chains are being rerouted around geopolitical risk. Capital is moving into markets that most Western firms still do not fully understand. Artificial intelligence is dismantling the middle of the organizational chart. Energy, water, food security, elder care, and the financing of all four sit wide open. Each of those is an unmet market with buyers already waiting, and no rule exists anywhere that determines who founds the companies that will serve them. Why not us?

Much of the business architecture we operate inside was designed for a market that no longer exists and a workforce that no longer exists. Someone will rebuild it. For every great shift that led to a business renaissance, from the Industrial Revolution to this AI revolution, opportunities are constantly emerging, and these opportunities are ours for the taking. The women I know have run careers, households, budgets, and communities at the same time, under constraint, without adequate resources, and on deadline. Call that a hardship story if you like. I prefer to see it as operating experience, and it is precisely the capability that a broken model requires. And right now, the world is a broken model waiting for us to reimagine the way forward.

We do not need permission to become indispensable.

None of this happens alone, and it does not happen among women only. Any  strategy that writes off half the decision makers in a market is a poor strategy. Men are our clients, our investors, our suppliers, our referral sources, and in a great many cases they have been our most effective advocates. Shared purchasing lowers cost. Shared supplier networks harden fragile supply chains. Shared client relationships turn a small firm into a credible bidder on work it could never win alone. And commercial opportunity is enhanced by our social connection.

Collaboration is a commercial instrument before it is a social one.

Then there is the most powerful and portable asset available to all of us. Writing the policy paper and publishing the position. Taking the interview and positioning ourselves to be interviewed. Testifying before the committee. Building the framework that other people will need. Expertise travels with you across borders, sectors, and economic cycles, and it holds its value while everything around it is being renegotiated. For me, this philosophy has been the basis of my entire career journey as a businesswoman, founder, and humanitarian.

Expertise is the one credential that no court can reverse and no election can repeal.

When our expertise is built and shared consistently, the outcomes we normally lobby for begin arriving by another route. Boards recruit for the subject they are missing, and the woman who owns that subject gets the call. Promotions follow the person an organization cannot afford to lose because her expertise, knowledge, and perspective are too valuable to disregard. Clients choose the firm that solves the problem in front of them, and no one convenes a meeting about the founder’s gender before signing the contract when that contract leads to impact to their bottom line. I learned this lesson building my career in one of the most stereotypically difficult regions of the world. The Middle East. Establish yourself as an innovator, problem solver and contributor, people, enterprises and governments stop seeing a gender and they start seeing you as a critical asset.

When you are the answer, the conversation stops being about you and starts being with you.

This does not replace the law. Statutory protection matters, judicial support matters, and enforcement matters more than either, because a right that no one enforces does not protect anyone. Credit access, contract enforcement, health, safety, and equal pay are legislative questions, and they are settled by the people who hold office. That brings me to the part no business strategy can substitute for. Our voices have to be heard, and our votes have to be cast, in the local races as much as the national ones, in the school board meeting and the zoning hearing and the statehouse, where most of the decisions that shape a small business are actually made. Turnout is the cheapest leverage available to us, and too often we leave it unused.

Voting is the floor, however. The ceiling is holding the office yourself. Our first national president, Gail Laughlin, was elected to the Maine legislature in 1929 and later to the state senate, where she sponsored the bills that raised the legal marriage age for girls from thirteen to sixteen, stopped husbands from committing their wives to institutions without a medical opinion, and put women on juries. She did not achieve any of that from outside the building. She went inside. Everything I have argued here qualifies a woman for that seat. The woman who has rerouted a supply chain understands trade policy. The woman who has met a payroll understands tax policy. The woman who built the solution understands the regulation better than the person drafting it. Put your name on the ballot for the school board, the borough council, the county commission, the statehouse. A district with a problem to solve will elect the person who can solve it, and that necessity does not stop to consider gender.

In 1921 this federation adopted its emblem, and among the five symbols inside the golden circle our founders placed a ship of commerce. They chose it to mark the entrance of women into business. One year after the vote was won, two years before the Equal Rights Amendment was even written, the women who came before us put commerce at the center of the design. They understood where the argument would eventually be settled.

The future of business cannot be built without us. Our work is to make that obvious.

Larisa B. Miller
NFBPWC Virtual